Equipment

Our latest efforts have been produced using the equipment listed below.

Cameras

One of the best DV cameras. 3 1/3" CCD's. 24 frame progressive mode, with cinegamma modes for film look. Amazing low light capabilities. Great manual controls and XLR audio connectors built-in.

This is a good quality 3CCD mini-dv camera. It has manual control of exposure, white-balance and audio level, though the compact size makes the controls cumbersome. For more details see John Beale's page.

One of the smallest DV cameras available (as of 09/2004). This one does not have the memory stick slot or some of the other useless bells and whistles of the higher-end models. Only a 10x zoom, but I got a 2x telephoto adapter that works pretty well. Touch screen controls are mostly awkward, but the touch to focus is a feature I'd love to have on the TRV-900 to do pull-focus shots with. It works on this camera, but with the 1/6th inch CCD's there is always too much depth of field.

This is a digital still camera with outstanding high-res output.

This tiny, high-quality digital still camera is so small it we can take it anywhere.

Lights

Mics

Non-Linear Editors

We started with the Iomega Buz in 1998. It worked very poorly, but gave us a taste of what could be done using a computer for an editor. It now has much better drivers under Linux than under Windows, but there is still only limited editing software.

This card is very similar to the Buz, but has vastly better support. It doesn't work very well under NT, but has been very stable and functional under Win98 with Premiere 5.1.

This card is very powerful, able to play 2 streams of DV or mpeg2 video in real time. It can do cross fades and a variety of transitions in real-time. It was a royal pain to get all the necessary cards to co-exist and we never got the sound card in. Fortunately with the 2.0 update from Matrox most of the sound comes through the RT2000. The 2.0 update has been very stable for us, we've been able to make a 2 hour program with real-time titles and many real-time transitions without a single crash.
This system now includes a Pioneer A03 DVD recordable drive for direct DVD authoring.

This is an updated version of the RT2000. It supports 3 layers of graphics and 2 layers of video in real time. It is not very different from the RT2000, but definitely an improvement in many areas. The RTX-100 works with Windows XP and Adobe Premiere Pro which seem more stable than earlier versions, though they make this 2.8 Ghz machine seem very slow.
This system includes A Pioneer A05 DVD recordable drive, and a Shuttle Pro 2 jog/shuttle controller.

Misc Hardware

Special Effects Software

This is a really good video paint program. It lacks particle systems and it's compositing is more limited than I had hoped because all layers must be the same size and you cannot move layers. You can simulate moving a layer by importing an avi as a brush and moving the brush, but it's not the same as animating layers.